Photography in Fiction: Love in the Time of Cholera

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel is set in an unnamed city in northern Colombia, perhaps an amalgam of Cartagena and Barranquilla, in an undated period around 1875-1924 (or 1880-1930, sources differ).  The main characters are Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza, who fall in love in their youth, only to be separated and lead very different lives.  Florentino’s passion endures and on the death of Fermina’s husband, Dr. Juvenal Urbino, their mutual love flowers anew in their old age.  The novel starts shortly before Urbino’s death, goes back in time to Florentino and Fermina’s first meeting, then traces the 50 years of separation leading to the final reunion.

In the opening scene Urbino attends the death of Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, who has committed suicide.  De Saint-Amour was an Antillean refugee, disabled war veteran, (who had escaped the firing squad and may have committed various crimes), formidable chess player (he had beaten Capablanca) and photographer of children.  His is found lying ‘on the campaign cot where he had always slept, and beside it was a stool with the developing tray he had used to vaporize the poison’, gold cyanide.  The room ‘served as both bedroom and laboratory’ and Urbino notes the ‘muffled windows’, ‘crumbling pewter trays’, ‘ordinary light bulb covered with red paper’, a tray ‘for the fixative solution’ and ‘piles of negatives on glass plates’.  Urbino has no doubt about what has happened: ‘the odor [bitter almonds] in the house was sufficient proof that the cause of death had been cyanide vapors activated in the tray by some photographic acid, and Jeremiah de Saint-Amour knew too much about these matters for it to have been an accident.’

De Saint-Amour’s parlor doubles as his studio.  ‘In the parlor was a huge camera on wheels like the ones used in public parks, and the backdrop of a maritime twilight, painted with homemade paints, and the walls papered with pictures of children at memorable moments: the first Communion, the bunny costume, the happy birthday.’

De Saint-Amour lived in primitive austerity and ‘earned much more with his art than he needed’.  Urbino had met de Saint Amour through a shared love of chess and ‘eventually lent him the money to set up his photography studio … from the time he took his first picture of a child startled by the magnesium flash’.  He had become a photographer of children out of necessity and had been one of the most successful in the province.  Urbino describes him as an ‘atheistic saint’.  Though that faith is tested when he discovers that the photographer had a ‘mulatta’ mistress, who had helped him fulfil his intention to take his life at sixty.

Later at a gala luncheon Urbino thinks de Saint-Amor’s ‘dedication of his art to the happiness of children.’ And speaks to the Mayor ‘about the advantages of purchasing his files of photographic plates in order to preserve the images of a generation who might never again be happy outside their portraits and in whose hands lay the future of the city.’  The Archbishop, though scandalised by the suicide, ‘agrees with the plan to create an archive of the negatives’.

De Saint-Amor’s predecessor as a photographer in the city is an unnamed Belgian, who arrives there around 1875-80; and ‘set up his studio at the end of the Arcades of the Scribes and all those with the money to pay took advantage of the opportunity to have their pictures taken.’  Fermina and her cousin, Hildebranda, dressed as mid-century ladies prepare to be among the first.  They look in the mirror ans see ‘the resemblance to the daguerreotypes of their grandmothers.’  When they arrive, the front of the studio is crowded as the boxing champion on Panama is having his photograph taken.  This is not easy ‘because he had to hold a fighting stance for a whole minute and breathe as little as possible, but as soon as he put up his guard, his fans burst into cheers and he could not resist the temptation to please them by showing off his skill.’

By the time the cousins come to be photographed the sky has clouded over, but with their faces powdered with starch and their lips painted with a chocolate-coloured salve, ‘they leaned against an alabaster column with such ease that they remained motionless for more time than seemed reasonable.’ 

It proves to be ‘an immortal portrait’.  Many years later when Hildebranda visits Fermina she brings her copy with her.  It was almost invisible, ‘but they could both recognise themselves through the mists of disenchantment: young and beautiful as they would never be again’.  Fermina’s print had been kept in a family album, but has disappeared mysteriously.  When Florentino starts to court Fermina after Urbino’s death he gives her a copy of the picture, ‘which he had brought for fifteen centavos at a postcard sale in the Arcade of the Scribes’. 

An aside: Florentino has seen just two photographs of his father, one of him in Santa Fe leaning against a pedestal, the other of him in a group of soldiers ‘and his moustache had a gunpowder smell that wafted out of the picture’.

Love in the Time of Cholera was published in 1985.  Marquez creates a convincing picture of aspects of the practice of photography around 100 and 60 years previously.  The Belgian has to cope with the limitations of slow orthochromic film and his subjects suffer the demands of holding long poses.  De Saint-Amor is a photographer who, for all his comparative success, works in a way that suggests an out-of-date provincial backwater.  Even so, it’s not clear what he’s doing with gold cyanide, which is an insoluble yellow solid. Tincture of iodine was added to dilute solutions of potassium cyanide and used as a fixer, especially with collodion wet plates, which he would be unlikely to be using.  Maybe gold cyanide just sounds more exotic.

While the photographers have only minor parts in the book, Marquez explores the importance of photography.  De Saint-Amor’s photographs embody the evanescence of childhood, the happy days that will not return and are also important record of the life of the city that is clearly changing against a background of political turmoil.  The ‘immortal portrait’ also captures that lost past and as it fades becomes a metaphor for the slow slipping away of the lives of Florentina and Fermina.  Yet the love survives.

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